1. Individual Blog:
You’ll maintain in individual blog with different kinds of weekly posts and weekly substantive responses to at least two classmates’ posts. Some weeks, you’ll have three posts: A reflection on readings, your “Make” due at class time, and your Six Word Exit Ticket. During Book Circle Weeks, you’ll do an additional post to support discussion among your group on your shared reading.
One “reflective writing” post.
- Each week, you’ll write one five-six paragraph critical response to course readings. What questions do you have? What connections are you seeing between readings? What would you like to challenge in the readings? What has you thinking most deeply after doing this reading? What connections are you seeing to life outside our course?
- Use images, gifs, memes, or other embedded media to communicate some of your thoughts or reactions.
- Pay attention to formatting. Text copy and pasted from any other platform will need to be edited: Add white space, headings, hyperlinks.
- I’m less concerned with assigning # of words than I am with having something interesting to read.
- Post your weekly “make” (see below). In some cases, you’ll need to first upload your “make” to a hosting site like youtube or vimeo.
Book circles
- During the weeks of Book Circles (weeks 3-8) post at least reflective response to the book you’re reading and respond to the posts of at least two of your circle’s classmates. Link to your circle-mates’ posts as part of your conversation.
Two “Makes”
- Post your out-of-class weekly makes and reflections (see assignment just below)
- Post a “Six Word Exit Ticket”: At the end of class (or by midnight on Wednesdays), post a Six Word Exit Ticket responding to our class session. These should be a visual, made with a tool such as Canva or Adobe Spark Post. Have fun while also pausing to articulate your thinking.
Blogging Logistics:
- I recommend wordpress.com as your blogging platform.
- Tag or Categorize your posts with the general types of writing above (reflective writing/ book circles/Makes. [if you’re doing 452, add “service learning”] and add a widget for your tags or categories. We can demo this in class.
- Email Jane your URL by Monday April 2 at noon.
2. Weekly “Makes” (Post on your own blog)
In weekly “makes”, we’ll do small, playful media creations designed to help us to understand what’s “under the hood” of different forms of media. As we create these projects between class sessions, we’ll become more aware of how others create media to inform, persuade, connect, and entertain us.
We’ll do some “makes” in class and you’ll do a weekly project on your own. Each week, you’ll be asked to do either a specific project or choose anything from the “Make Bank” page.
Upload/ embed everything to your own blog (see below) along with a minimum 3 paragraph critical reflection on:
- What things you’ve learned about decision-making in media creation that shapes audience understanding. What might you “see” differently in media now, knowing how media is created?
- Thoughts on technique — what works well for you in your creation and what would you like to explore if you were to do it again.
The Big Idea here is “What Did I Learn in This Media Creation”, not just posting your projects.
How do I learn how to do this??
On the menu on this website, go to the “Professional Resources” tab, and then the Media Making dropdown tab. You’ll find information there about apps, software, tutorials, and ideas. We can also take some class time to play with some of these creations.
Choose from the Make Bank activities for your Free Choice weeks.
3. Book Circles
In groups of at least three, read one of the books on the “book circles” page. Together, discuss in weekly blog posts and responsive comments, and create a final video or info graphic “make” representing core themes of the book.
Book Circles begin week 3 of the quarter and end Week 8 with the posting and brief presentation of the collaborative “make” posted to each member’s blog.
You can create a group in “We Discuss” to coordinate reading schedules and work on your final “make”.
4. Building Collective Wisdom about Media Literacy
Media literacy is about being a valuable member of a network. We’ll exercise that in class. Do at least two of these each week.
- Annotate of the week’s readings on Hypothes.is with questions, links to supportive resources, connections to other course readings. At least two annotations per reading.
- Tweet resources from outside of class using our class hashtag. At least three tweets per week. Find things to share from other relevant twitter feeds, blogs or videos. See Teaching Resources pages for some of the core work in the field, follow our authors on social media, find people that these people share on their feeds. Googling to find resources is unlikely to get you to better information. In this case, using the expertise of a network of people you follow on social media is likely to get you better information.
- An extra blog post with reflections on differences you’re noticing in your engagement with media as you look now through more critical eyes.
5. Adventures in Fact Checking:
Sign up for one week in which you’ll lead us through a five minute max fact checking exercise from either Mike Caulfield’s FourMove blog or his comprehensive list of web searches for Online Literacy Classes
With specific strategies from his book and demo videos, walk us through steps we should take to decide whether information we find is true, value, or worth sharing.
Make this a lively and intriguing hunt for the truth!
6. Critical Media Literacy Tool Kit.
Create a comprehensive tool kit for yourself and to share with select others: colleagues, peers, family, and/or social media networks. Choose your audience: This could be resources for the age level you teach, resources for professional colleagues to support their professional development (or some combination of kid/teacher resources), resources for family members or friends who are grappling with how to sort through the flood of information. If you are a teacher, you may want to focus on one content area.
You’ll publish this on the internet, whether anonymously or under own name.
You may work with a partner on this to build even more comprehensive resources.
Basic requirements:
Create a website (made on WordPress, Weebly, Google Sites, Adobe Spark, Microsoft Sway) compiling and organizing specific resources that you can use to support the work of teaching others to become more critical about media, as consumers and creators.
It should be clear that you’ve invested approximately 10 hour of work in constructing the site — you’ve gone pretty far into the media literacy websites beyond the front pages, compared the relative value of various curricula, lessons, resources, sought out additional resources shared recently from our authors and professional organizations.
Successful projects will include:
- Carefully chosen links to resources-that-teach, along with your evaluation of their value. These can be lessons, teaching games, exercises for people to check their own media literacy or understanding of digital privacy. Start with the resources on the professional resources pages on our class website. Don’t just link — clarify why you’ve chosen what you’ve chosen out of everything available.
- Links to key readings appropriate for your audience, for context on the “why” and the scope of the problem (those from class, from our RSS feed, from links you’ve seen on Twitter. Do not simply Google.
- Include the most valuable hashtags, social media accounts, or other resources for staying up-to-date on this ever-changing field.
- Include resources for both consuming and creating content on the internet.
- Make deliberate decisions about visual design and organization: White space, headings, pages, images, embedded media. This should be an inviting and easy to navigate website.
Final Course Evaluation:
Your final grade will be based on :
Blogs/commenting 30%
Makes: 15%
Book Circles 15%
Adventures in Fact Checking : C/NC
Contributions to Collective Wisdom 10%
Critical Media Literacy Tool Kit 30%
See Rubric for specifics.
